How did the Black Death reach the Iberian peninsula?

The Black Death reaches the peninsula

La peste negra llega a la península

March 1348–1350. The plague that killed perhaps a third of Europe between 1347 and 1352 arrived in the Crown of Aragon by sea.

Where: Spain, Catalonia, Valencia, Aragon, Castile

What happened

The plague that killed perhaps a third of Europe between 1347 and 1352 arrived in the Crown of Aragon by sea. It was in Mallorca by late March 1348 and in Barcelona, Tarragona and Valencia in May, then moved inland to Zaragoza by September; Queen Leonor of Aragon died of it in October. In Castile it reached the royal camp besieging Gibraltar, where King Alfonso XI died in March 1350, the only reigning European monarch killed by the Black Death. Death rates are impossible to know exactly, and some historians now think older estimates for Catalonia were too high, but whole villages emptied, wages rose and fields went untilled. The shock also fed suspicion of minorities and helped prepare the violence against Jews in 1391.

Say it

La peste negra llegó a Mallorca y Barcelona en 1348.

The Black Death reached Mallorca and Barcelona in 1348.

Why it matters

The plague halved the population that would speak and write fourteenth-century Castilian and Catalan, reshaped who worked the land, and darkened the mood of the century that produced the pogroms of 1391.

Connected

• The anti-Jewish riots of 1391 (6 June 1391–1392)
• The anti-Jewish riots of 1391 (6 June 1391–1392)

• Before: The Nasrids build the Alhambra
• After: The anti-Jewish riots of 1391

Sources

1. La pesta del 1348 als Països Catalans — Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana
2. Black Death — World History Encyclopedia
3. Review of J. F. O'Callaghan, The Gibraltar Crusade (Donald Kagay) — The Medieval Review, Indiana University